On the Wings of an Angel (Part Three)
On the Wings of an Angel (Part Three)
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Disclaimer and author's note, etc., back in the Master Post
On the Wings of an Angel
text by phoenix.writing
illustrations by creepylicious
Part Three
Though Arthur knew better than to think he knew exactly what to expect in dreams, his dreams were becoming more and more bizarre-and he wasn't even working.
But he had known that no matter how angry Eames was, he would have questions eventually, and it didn't really come as a surprise that he had requested that they have the discussion in the dream world. It was absolutely expected that he wanted Arthur to be both the dreamer and the subject; he felt that they'd spent enough time in Eames's subconscious, and Arthur wasn't going to argue with him.
He knew, after all, that this was desperately difficult.
He had fought his first insane impulse to bring them to the bookstore. It was too early to be messing with Eames's sense of reality like that, and his reasoning might be misconstrued. Honestly, though, Arthur had just been trying to think of the most positive space for them, and the shop featured prominently as the location where they had been happiest. By far, really.
Since that thought was nixed, he had brought them to somewhere new that had no associations for either of them.
He'd started with a park on a mild spring day. He had no idea what Eames wanted to do and didn't want the man to feel as though he were boxed in. Arthur didn't think that alcohol would help this conversation, and he'd emptied the park so that if Eames felt the need to physically attack, there wouldn't be any witnesses.
He was going to take it as a good sign that it didn't seem as though Eames intended to maim him in reality.
They were sitting on a park bench with a good foot between them, which Arthur had thought safest under the circumstances. Eames was wearing one of his most garish shirts, an overly busy paisley pattern in horribly clashing colours of maroon and lime green and fluorescent orange.
The grass was very green, there were big fluffy white clouds in a very blue sky, and squirrels chased one another up and down the trees in front of them. A couple dogs barked in the distance, giving the illusion that the park was populated without any people getting in the way.
Arthur had a coffee in his hand, and it told him that he wasn't quite as in control as he'd meant to be because the thought had only been half-formed. But he knew without looking that it had caramel and cinnamon and too much frothed milk, and he handed it to Eames, who hesitated a shade too long before he took it, telling Arthur that he was probably lucky he hadn't had it thrown in his face.
At least he didn't have to worry about dry cleaning bills in dreams.
Eames took a sip of his coffee and stared out at the landscape rather than looking at Arthur, so Arthur looked straight ahead as well.
"This is all looking very normal," Eames observed.
Arthur had promised himself that he would answer any questions, but the temptation to answer monosyllabically here was almost impossible to ignore.
But Eames shouldn't have to work for it, not after everything he'd been through. He might hate Arthur now, but he still deserved answers.
"It usually does when I'm in control of myself."
"I've never seen anyone create like that, and that includes Cobb and Ariadne."
"It's not a very practical skill."
"Sort of extraordinary, though."
Arthur cast a sidelong look at Eames but couldn't read anything from his face. That had sounded kind of … complimentary. There were other words for what Arthur had done, words that had straightforward negative connotations.
There were so many places Arthur could go with that comment, and he finally went with what he thought might turn the conversation off him a little, or at least back to the direct subject at hand.
"The circumstances warranted it."
"You felt guilty for my being lost in limbo."
Arthur swallowed and admitted, "Yes."
Eames slammed the coffee cup down on the bench, and Arthur turned to find that the other man was glaring at him.
"You thought I sold you out!"
There really weren't words for how stupid Arthur felt about that. It was obvious that he had done, and it was still almost impossible for Arthur to nod his head and admit his stupidity.
But Eames had been lost in limbo and had killed a man because of Arthur's mistake.
"It was stupid and inexcusable. I apologize."
Eames let out a huff of breath. "Fuck, it's harder to be angry with you when you're being all downtrodden and honest. Start being snotty and entitled again so I can be annoyed."
Arthur felt his lips tip up a little in spite of himself and saw an answering gleam in Eames's eyes.
Arthur made himself keep talking, knowing he was not off the hook just because Eames had allowed a moment of humour. He'd camped out in Eames's subconscious, and he needed to be brutally honest in return.
"Learning what I thought was a complete betrayal of the trust that I reposed in you was kind of … earth-shattering. I panicked and needed to reassess everything; disappearing was the only way I knew to fix the problem that didn't involve … anything permanent."
Eames's head tilted slightly to one side, and his gaze was sharp.
"Tell me, Arthur, how close did Collins and I come to getting a bullet between the eyes?"
Arthur sucked in a breath and let it out slowly before offering a slightly shaky nod. Fortunately, Eames didn't press the point.
"But instead, you disappeared off the face of the planet."
"That doesn't impact anyone but me."
"And everyone who's looking for you, Darling."
Arthur would never admit the warmth that blossomed inside of him at hearing that ridiculous term of endearment again.
"I hadn't anticipated most people trying for very long."
"And didn't mind if some people wasted a lot of time and energy and money?" Eames asked pointedly.
"Not at the time," Arthur agreed.
"You are aware that most people can't poof into thin air at a whim?"
"I'm not most people."
"You don't talk about your training."
"It's hardly the sort of thing I want advertised, and I would think plenty of it could be inferred based on my abilities at work."
"There are abilities and then there are super powers."
Arthur laughed. "You haven't worked out by now that I like to be good at what I do?"
Eames rolled his eyes. "It's one of the most obvious things about you."
"So when I believed that I'd misjudged everything I knew about you, I corrected rather severely."
"Facts were pretty thin to the ground for you to have so little faith in me."
"I forgot how good you are at forging."
"That's insulting, you know."
It was said very mildly, though, and Arthur's lips tipped up.
"You sounded very convincing."
"'Eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves'," Eames quoted virtuously.
Arthur sighed. "Ariadne?"
Nodding, Eames admitted, "I'm still trying to work out how you heard everything, though. Collins designed it so that we wouldn't be overheard, and the only person-"
He cut off abruptly, straightening as though he'd been electrified, and Arthur just sat there and waited for the shit storm to start.
Eames erupted off the bench, stalked away six steps, and then whirled back to get in Arthur's face and demand, "What was I, then? Cheap labour when you didn't feel like it? Someone to laugh at afterwards?"
Arthur frowned. "You know you're the best, and I'm not a forger."
His definite words appeared to mollify the man a little, for he backed up a bit and sounded less enraged when he spoke again.
"You certainly didn't look like you down there. Not unless there's a sex change you've forgotten to tell me about."
Arthur's lip curled up. "That would be a less complicated answer."
An eyebrow rose. "I'm all ears."
Arthur drew a deep breath and let it out slowly.
"Hers is the only other form I can take, and no one else knows. Not Dom, not even Mal. I never use her for work, never when I'm sharing a dream."
"And yet…." Eames trailed off leadingly.
With an effort, Arthur stilled the urge to squirm and swallowed against a constricted throat. "I thought you were being tortured or killed."
Eames sat down on the bench again, only a great deal nearer than he had been before.
"You're very hard to work out, Darling. You blow hot and cold more effectively than central air."
Arthur snorted, and Eames's lips tipped up.
"Not really," Arthur corrected. "You told Collins exactly right. There isn't very much I won't do for the people I care about."
"You're telling me we're friends."
Arthur nearly laughed at the distaste that Eames had infused into the one word.
"I spent all my time in limbo flirting with you. I think it's been blown out of the water, Eames."
"You didn't even want to kiss me in a dream!" Eames snapped.
"Didn't want to kiss you?" Arthur made a choked sound in the back of his throat. "I wanted to kiss you so badly I could barely see straight. It took me weeks to be sure that when I saw you again, I wasn't going to forget who I was and the fact that I needed to rescue you."
Eames's eyebrows had drawn together in a scowl. "If that's the case, then why didn't you bring it up in reality?"
"When?" Arthur demanded incredulously. "While you were in the hospital recovering from a life-altering event with serious physical consequences?"
Arthur found himself quite suddenly on the ground with Eames on top of him.
"You are so fucking noble, Darling."
Any response that Arthur might have had to this was swallowed by Eames's mouth over his.
It was everything that Arthur wanted it to be. He was in the right body, and while they hadn't clarified everything, they both knew that they wanted this. And Eames was a fantastic kisser, something which Arthur had already known but which he got to appreciate to the fullest now.
It had been a long time since Eames had been on top of him like this; pressed up against the man in bed when he was recovering had sometimes been a bit torturous from Arthur's point of view, but it had almost always been completely non-sexual because it was so clear that Eames needed help.
Eames was much more recovered than he had been, and here in the dream, he remembered himself as he usually was, meaning everything worked just the way that it was supposed to.
When they needed to breathe again, Eames drew back to say, "You could have saved yourself doing a runner if you'd mentioned you'd like to talk about it when I was feeling well."
"You might have saved me two runners if you'd mentioned what you were doing after I refrained from shooting Collins."
"What do you think I was doing?" Eames demanded, sounding affronted.
"Trying to get into my pants?" Arthur thought that had been very obvious.
Eames rolled his eyes. "You always leave after a job, and you have never accepted my invitation for company. You didn't strike me as a bloke who shags and runs, and that would have given us the opportunity to figure out a game plan."
"Huh." This possibility had definitely not occurred to Arthur. "That was a good plan."
Eames leaned down to kiss Arthur again, though this kiss was much more fleeting before he rose to his feet and offered Arthur a hand, pulling him to his feet.
Wryly, Arthur observed, "It's a bad sign when you want answers more than you want sex, isn't it?"
Eames laughed and pulled Arthur back onto the bench. Their thighs were pressed together now, and Eames hadn't let go of Arthur's hand.
"I want a relationship more than I want sex," Eames corrected.
There was really no possible way that Arthur could respond to this other than to climb on top of Eames and try to examine his tonsils. Eames's hands slipped altogether lower than was polite, and Arthur tried simultaneously to deepen that contact and grind down against the other man.
"Was I saying something?" Eames asked when they came up for air.
"You very sensibly wanted to get some of our issues sorted," Arthur admitted, moving to sit back down.
Eames tightened his grip to hold Arthur in place. "Sod sensible."
"Sex can be the next order on the agenda."
Eames laughed and let Arthur climb off of him.
"I never thought I'd hear you say that."
"Dream a little bigger, Darling," Arthur repeated smugly.
This surprised a laugh out of Eames, though he sounded almost rueful when he admitted, "There were times where I thought I was dreaming pretty big as it was."
"I don't like to be a notch in a bedpost."
"It came across a little more as dismissive and occasionally homicidal, in case you were wondering."
"If I hadn't cared," Arthur corrected, "we would have gone to bed the first time you called me 'Darling'."
Eames positively crowed with delight. "I knew you liked it when I called you 'Darling'!"
Arthur's lips twitched, amused by just how pleased Eames was. "I'll deny it if asked."
"Of course you will, Darling." Eames tacked the endearment on with obvious relish.
Arthur resigned himself to never again hearing his actual name out of the other man's mouth. It was remarkably easy to accept when he was certain of the genuineness of the term.
Eames sighed and admitted, "I knew you well enough that I should have expected you to be suspicious about all of it, really. But I thought I'd have a little more time."
"I should have thought about it rationally. You should never have been put in that position," Arthur apologized.
Eames shook his head. "Oh, don't blame yourself for that one. It was never going to end any way other than a bullet to the head once he was stupid enough to tell me that he intended to kill you. He was a crap judge of character for an extractor."
Arthur didn't think Eames could be quite as blasé about it as he was claiming given that he had built himself a prison sentence in limbo, but they all had the feelings they didn't want to share.
"I still…. You didn't have to, and it means a lot to me that you went after him."
"Just because Cobb persists in having his head stuck up his arse doesn't mean that the rest of us don't care for you, Arthur."
Arthur stiffened and warned, "Don't go there, Eames."
Surprisingly, Eames looked a little … sheepish? "Kind of already did. Cobb wants to talk to you."
Arthur let out a big huffy sigh and tried to pretend that he wasn't kind of touched. Eames did this ridiculous thing where he looked at Arthur with puppy-dog eyes and then beamed when he realised that Arthur wasn't actually that upset.
Arthur rolled his eyes but couldn't help but smile back. God, he was going to have to find a backbone somewhere, or Eames was going to get everything he wanted all the damn time.
"Dom's going to have to get into line."
Eames's eyes flashed.
"I suppose you'd object if I ripped all your clothes off while we had our discussion?"
"I don't think there'd be a lot of discussion if you did that," Arthur pointed out wryly.
Eames's gaze, which had been focussed on Arthur's lips, was travelling steadily downward, and his hands inched their way up Arthur's thighs. "Discussion is overrated."
"But there are still a lot of things that you want to know."
Eames sighed and drew his eyes back up to Arthur's face with what looked like a monumental effort. His hands stopped moving, but they weren't removed.
"Those two notions should not be mutually exclusive, Darling."
"So, you're saying that you're going to be so mediocre I can carry on a coherent conversation at the same time?" Arthur asked dryly.
Eames's jaw came close to falling open. An incredulous smile lit up his face. "You are in for the ride of your life."
"I'm looking forward to it," Arthur admitted with a grin of his own. "But I'd go into it with a clearer conscience if I knew I'd answered all questions to your satisfaction."
And once he was sure that Eames still … cared. Arthur hadn't had any intention of saying it out loud, but he was pretty sure that his face had given too much away, because Eames suddenly looked a lot more serious.
"You were telling me about the pretty blonde."
Arthur rolled his eyes at the obvious line of inquiry, but conceded, "She probably will explain everything, in the end." He hesitated for a moment, and then told a story that he had never relayed in its entirety to anyone. "When I was eight, my parents and I were in a car crash. They died on impact, and I ended up in a coma."
Eames's fingers had tightened, digging into Arthur's thighs. Clearly, this wasn't at all what he had been expecting.
"I had some pretty severe head trauma, and I think I subconsciously knew that my parents were dead and that was my mind's way of trying to protect me." He swallowed, finding this harder than he'd thought he would. "I got totally lost down there. You saw the sort of stuff that I did. I could have stayed there forever."
"But here you are," Eames prompted gently when Arthur froze, sliding his hands down Arthur's thighs in a move that was curiously un-sexual.
"Here I am," Arthur agreed, grateful for the nudge, "and that's thanks to Hope."
"How did hope help if you were happy down there?"
"The 'pretty blonde' is named Hope."
"Ah." Eames looked a little chagrined again, and Arthur wondered if it was a mark of Arthur's honesty now or the fact that they'd spent so much time in limbo together that Eames seemed to be so much more willing to show Arthur genuine emotion now. "I'll stick to mentioning her eyes from now on, shall I? Her nice personality?"
Arthur laughed. "You haven't been on her bad side. I hated her for quite a while."
"I take it she's the one who got you out of limbo?"
"Not the way you mean, but yes."
Eames looked puzzled now. "How many ways are there? My brain's going to explode if you tell me I'm a mental construct who's been in limbo with you since you were eight."
Arthur rolled his eyes, impressed with the way that Eames could make him feel better with irreverence without making Arthur feel as though the other man wasn't taking it seriously.
"She forced me out of limbo."
Eames frowned. "No one can force you out of limbo. You have to-Ah."
You have to do it yourself. It was why Dom couldn't have just killed Mal in her sleep and woken them up in reality. Why he'd needed to make Saito aware of the truth. Why Ariadne and Fischer had jumped together.
And why Hope wasn't a real person, or Arthur would have died or gone insane.
"She's, uh, sort of like Dom's projection of Mal, I guess. Has her own personality and agenda."
"But she was trying to save you," Eames pointed out gently.
Arthur nodded stiffly. "I really didn't want to leave. And when I woke up in a world where I was weak and alone and a child, all I wanted to do was get back. I had foster parents for a bit, but I wasn't really … coping well. Ended up in a home and spent all my time and energy trying to figure out how to get back there-and get around Hope, because she had warned me that I wouldn't be able to find it and get past her easily. I think it was her way of making sure I didn't just walk in front of a bus or take a header from a building or something."
If he'd been sure he could have got back to his world, he would have done it. Eames's hands had tightened on Arthur's thighs again, so Arthur was pretty sure the sentiment had been communicated.
"I had to get creative. I spent the next ten years learning everything there was to know about comas and lucid dreaming and altered states of reality. Got my hands on a PASIV and started experimenting."
Eames was frowning. "It wasn't declassified before you turned eighteen."
"No," Arthur agreed.
"Shit, Darling," Eames swore, and there was a great deal of admiration in his voice. "You stole a PASIV from the military before you turned eighteen?"
"I was pretty desperate," Arthur conceded with a shrug. "I spent a long time with the machine on my own, but it was never right. I could make changes and creations, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't home. So then I thought using the PASIV with someone else in a coma would get me to the right level and bypass Hope. But it wasn't my world, and it wasn't very…. It was a lot less pleasant than mine, and it was like he was trapped, not happy there. I tried to get us both out."
Eames tugged Arthur closer and wrapped an arm around him, pressing a kiss to the side of his head. Arthur sighed and leaned into the embrace, telling himself that he wasn't snuggling and wondering who he was trying to fool. Eames felt fantastically warm, and Arthur was feeling very cold.
"He died." Arthur forced the words out through a constricted throat. "For the first time, I started to think that maybe locked in my own head wasn't where I should be."
Eames had started running his fingers through Arthur's hair, destroying the work that the gel had been doing. It was rhythmic and soothing-and seemed to underline very solidly that Eames wasn't running away from him in disgust. Arthur kept talking.
"At that point, I came under some … professional scrutiny, and once it became clear that I was far more knowledgeable than any of their so-called experts, I got pulled in to be part of their nascent dream work department."
The hands in Arthur's hair stilled suddenly; uncomfortable, Arthur pulled back.
Eames was staring at him like he'd never seen him before. "You're a spook?"
"I was, yes," Arthur admitted stiffly, a sick feeling churning in the pit of his stomach.
"And you actually wander around in a suit all the time?"
Arthur was spared the necessity of speaking by Eames dissolving into laughter, clutching at Arthur as he was altogether overcome by his mirth.
A tight constriction eased inside of Arthur as he realised that Eames simply had a questionable sense of humour rather than repudiating Arthur because he'd worked for a questionable governmental authority.
Eames wiped tears out of his eyes and got himself under control with an effort, still chuckling periodically and muttering under his breath about spooks.
Arthur weathered the storm, still massively relieved but feeling that he needed to hold onto his persona-and maybe a little annoyed that Eames found it that funny. He liked his suits and felt very professional in them, thank you very much. (Still, it was hard to be too annoyed when the other man looked so relaxed and happy and amused.)
"Just so you know," Arthur informed Eames matter-of-factly, "you're never wearing a horrible shirt again."
"Going to keep tearing me out of them, Darling?" Eames asked with a leer.
"Oh, it's not going to be nearly that fun for you," Arthur said smugly.
Eames raised an eyebrow.
"Looked at what you're wearing recently?"
Eames looked down at himself and then his head snapped up with comic speed.
"You can't alter me!" he yelped.
"Oh?" Arthur asked with mock innocence.
He let the suit fade away into the clothes the other man had come with-except that the hideous print had been replaced with a nice solid blue (that happened to match Eames's eyes, but Arthur wasn't going to mention that).
Eames still seemed shocked, and Arthur took pity on him.
"You can change it back if you concentrate hard enough."
Eames stared down at the shirt until it became flamboyantly colourful once more.
He looked up at Arthur again.
"I didn't think that could be done."
"We're all just projections of ourselves down here."
"Well, sure, but I'm supposed to control my projection of me."
"And you do. Something integral like your face, I can't change-unlike you-but your clothes are ephemeral. I control what I see, and I spent an eternity creating a world I wanted to live in, altering anything and everything with a thought."
"How many abilities do you hide on a regular basis?"
Arthur shrugged. "I don't really keep track. I know what people can generally do in dreams, and I know what abilities it's safer if others never start experimenting with. I do my best to protect people that way."
"You tried to keep Mal and Cobb out of limbo," Eames observed shrewdly.
Arthur looked away. "They loved experimenting together, and they were getting there so differently from me, and it was the two of them, and I … hoped that they would be okay. I tried to warn them of the dangers of what lay deeper, but I didn't tell them why specifically, and if I had-"
Eames cupped Arthur's face with his hands, making Arthur look at him. "She would still be dead, Arthur. You know both of them, probably better than anyone. They were stubborn, and there was nothing they didn't think they could accomplish. They would have told you that the situation was different, that you were alone and a child. They would have wanted to pit their intelligence against that problem. You could never have stopped them-and they wouldn't have taken you with them."
Arthur's eyes flickered closed, escaping from Eames's bright eyes that saw too much. Arthur wanted to believe him, but he wasn't sure that he could.
Eames leaned forward so that his forehead was resting against Arthur's, too close to stare at one another now, giving Arthur the distance he wanted-as well as the continued closeness.
"I don't think you hold any responsibility there, but even if you bear the smallest portion, you have more than made up for it. You moved mountains for him and the kids, kept them together when there was no logical reason for everything not to fall apart."
Arthur drew in a shuddering breath and let it out slowly. "It was so awful," he admitted, yet one more thing that he had never confessed to anyone else. "I remember being like her, so desperate to get somewhere else. She wanted to go back to what she thought was reality; I wanted to go back to the dream…. She lied, like I did, pretended to be placated for a little while, but never changed her mind."
"She didn't have Hope."
"I tried. I tried to convince her. I talked her out of slitting her wrists and carbon monoxide in the car. I don't think Dom ever found out about the pills and getting her stomach pumped. Pulled her back from oncoming traffic, caught her when she claimed she tripped at the top of the stairs, and tried to get her to see someone."
"Jesus Christ," Eames breathed against Arthur's face.
Arthur kept his eyes closed and concentrated on the feeling of the two of them touching.
"I tried to get her to believe in Cobb and the kids and me, just like Cobb did, but there was still that look in her eyes sometimes, and then Cobb called and-"
He broke off, unable to continue, and Eames pulled away to snarl, "I should have broken his face."
"It wasn't his fault," Arthur protested.
"I'm not even going to try to go there, Darling; I'm talking about what happened afterward. You shouldn't have had to keep this all inside for him."
"Not for him," Arthur murmured almost voicelessly.
"Ah."
Arthur snorted and pulled away far enough to look at Eames clearly.
"I'm not in love with her."
Eames didn't say anything, which Arthur could tell was his attempt to be diplomatic. He leaned forward and pressed his lips to Eames's in a firm but chaste kiss.
"Not really interested in women like that. I loved her, but she was the first true friend I'd had since I was eight."
"That's-"
"Sad, I know."
"I was going to say lonely. I'm glad she was there for you."
"She came up on the radar, and I was sent to assess what sort of a threat she was. I knew immediately that she outstripped the abilities of the vast majority of our agents. But she was … nice, and the Agency and I had begun to have ideological differences with regards to the dream work. So I took a chance and offered to throw in my lot with hers. She thought I was wasted as a phantôme and accepted."
"I wouldn't think that the Agency would just let you go like that."
Arthur eyed him, and Eames scoffed. "You didn't."
"She helped me perform the extraction, enough to be sure that they'd never come after me and giving me the time to perform a full wipe of the soft and hard copy."
"Shit, Darling. It's like finding out you're Spider-Man."
Arthur raised an eyebrow, not altogether getting the comparison.
"Well, see, you're all cool and efficient but normal. A little bit repressed and sort of mysterious, but that's just part of the fun. Only then I find out that you're a dream super ninja performing extractions on the CI-fucking-A."
Arthur waited for the punch line.
"It's incredibly hot."
He laughed, pleased that Eames was taking this so well.
Eames tugged him in for another kiss before asking, "Any other super powers I should know about? Shoot web out of your wrists?"
"Technically, the webbing isn't a superpower. Contrary to how it's often portrayed in films, it's just tech that's attached to Peter's wrists. He runs out all the time in the comic books."
Eames stared at him steadily, and Arthur felt a blush heat up his face. Eames's lips tipped up and then he tugged Arthur in for another kiss.
"That's quite possibly one of the cutest things I've ever witnessed, my little comic book geek."
"Do you have a death wish?" Arthur asked calmly.
"If I get to hear you go all geeky again? Quite possibly."
Arthur glared.
"Okay, okay." Eames raised his hands in an "I surrender" gesture but let the matter go with the air of a man who was going to bring it up again at the next available opportunity. "X-ray vision? Leap over tall buildings in a single bound?"
Arthur sighed and rose to his feet. He really wasn't going to get a better chance than this.
"I stopped trying to get back into limbo. I didn't see Hope again but occasionally I'd see … traces of her. And once we'd reconciled, I discovered that when I was in regular dream levels, I could appear as her."
"Which you only do when I'm in trouble," Eames pointed out promptly.
"You are so close to getting punched in the face," Arthur warned.
Eames just sat on the bench looking all smug and right. So Arthur shifted. Eames's lips tipped up into a lazy smile.
"Just as lovely as I remember-and it really is such a relief to know that I wasn't attracted to anything in that man's mind."
Arthur rolled his eyes. "Do you think we could stick to the point?"
"You mean you weren't trying to show me what a sexy woman you make?"
"I was showing you that I'm not a woman at all."
Eames's eyes made a very obvious perusal of Arthur's currently very female-looking form. Arthur waited until the other man's eyes made it back up to his face, the look of challenge in them clear, and then he launched himself into the sky, wings unfurling and carrying him aloft before he twisted and swooped back down to land lightly in front of Eames.
The man's jaw had actually dropped.
"You're an angel." He sounded completely dumbfounded.
"Hope is my guardian angel," Arthur corrected as he changed back into his regular form.
"An angel."
Arthur was sort of regretting showing off now. But he hadn't wanted to hide anything from Eames; if he was going to decide that this was all too much for him, Arthur would really prefer that it happen sooner than later.
He nodded in response to the comment and just stood there, awaiting a verdict.
"Can you carry me?"
Arthur blinked at him. Eames shot him a scathing glance.
"Can the two of us fly?"
Oh. Arthur had had altogether improbable images of him scooping the man up in his arms like he was going to … oh, carry him over the threshold or something, and he'd gotten altogether distracted.
"I have no idea," he admitted, reminding Eames, "It's never been anyone but me."
There'd been projections, sometimes, and Arthur had launched himself to the warehouse window with that one subcon, but sustained flight?
It had never crossed his mind.
"Curious?" Eames asked brightly.
Now that the idea had been brought up?
Eames grinned at him, rising to his feet, and Arthur became Hope once more.
"You realise this could end in tears?" he felt compelled to point out.
"It's a dream, Darling. Live a little."
"I'm going to regret saying this, I'm sure, but wrap your arms around my waist. Don't want you to get in the way of the wings."
Eames wrapped.
"My waist."
Eames corrected his grip reluctantly. Arthur tugged them together, wrapping his own arms around Eames's back. Hope's breasts were now squashed between them, and Arthur was reminded of how weird this was. They hadn't been quite this intimately twined when they were dancing in Collins's dream.
"Crouch a little." Arthur did so to illustrate, and Eames mirrored his movement. "I'm going to count to three, and then we're both going to kick off from the ground as hard as we can. Ready?"
"I was born ready."
Arthur duly counted down and kicked off with Eames. As Hope's wings unfurled, he knew that the weight was all wrong, but he flapped anyway, big sweeping strokes of his wings as hard as he could, reminded of those early occasions when he had first shifted and had needed to practice to even get off the ground and not wobble and drop at the slightest change in circumstance. Eames was clutching at him, holding too tight, but this made Arthur realise that he had a death grip on Eames, too.
Arthur soared higher and higher so that he would have room to coast and could possibly relax a bit and not just squeeze Eames to death.
The sun felt warmer up here, the breeze different, somehow, when you were flying through it and not attached to the ground. He wasn't nearly high enough to worry about thinning oxygen, and since Hope wasn't human, Arthur found that when he wasn't overreacting, it was possible to hold Eames up fairly easily. They still needed to keep a pretty tight hold on one another, but it started to feel a little more natural.
Eames was looking around himself curiously, peering at the large park and the city that was laid out below them in a very organised grid.
Eames leaned closer to speak in Arthur's ear.
"You are such a perfectionist, Darling."
"You say that like it's a bad thing," Arthur said with mock affront.
Laughing, Eames pointed out, "But you could do anything here. Why do this?"
"Because it gives nothing away. Because it means that I can navigate the city with ease."
"Who are you running from here?" Eames asked, as though Arthur had missed the obvious.
"It's always good to practice."
"I dare you to do something wild and crazy."
Arthur twisted and dove straight down, and Eames let out the most adorable yelp as he clutched desperately at Arthur. Arthur laughed in sheer delight at the rushing wind and the energy of it all.
Hope levelled out altogether closer to the ground than Eames was comfortable with if the fingers digging into Arthur's skin were any indication, and then Arthur was soaring upwards once more with great sweeping motions of Hope's wings, carrying the two of them aloft and reflecting that that had been kind of fun.
"Give a bloke a little warning next time, would you, Love?" Eames requested, sounding a little queasy.
Arthur just grinned at him, and a reluctant smile was tugged out of Eames as well.
"All right, I asked for that," he admitted.
Arthur smiled even more brightly, and a light that Arthur recognized blossomed in Eames's eyes.
"If you don't want to get shagged in that form, you'd better get us to solid ground right now."
Eames started when his feet touched something solid, and he looked round himself in wonder.
"I always wanted to do this," he said with awe.
"I was eight," Arthur reminded him softly.
Eames whirled around again, because Arthur was himself once more, and he'd dressed in jeans and a t-shirt in honour of the occasion, bare feet pressed into the improbably solid cloud beneath him.
"C'mere," Arthur instructed, and went to sit on the edge of the cloud, legs dangling over the edge-because that was what he wanted to do, and that was reason enough to do it.
A little more cautious, Eames followed, eventually seated next to him, whatever he had been thinking apparently forgotten as he watched the world beneath them destroyed in a fiery spray of lava from the active volcanoes that now covered the surface.
No smoke or ash ever reached them on their fluffy white cloud. Once the world had cooled again, a new city began to grow there.
"That's really quite extraordinary, you know," Eames said conversationally, but there was something underlying his tone that told Arthur that he really meant it.
Arthur shrugged. "I was there for a long time with a child's imagination. There were no limits, nothing I couldn't do."
"If that's the case, why can't you forge?"
"It never occurred to me as a child. I didn't want to be someone else, not like that. I enjoyed changing the world around me, but I didn't look in mirrors. I'm not sure I looked at myself the whole time I was there."
"Now, then," Eames pressed.
Arthur wondered why this bothered the other man so much. "Apart from needing the raw ability and possessing the requisite amount of sheer animal magnetism?"
Eames's lips tipped up, but he didn't say anything, telling Arthur that he really wanted an answer-an honest answer, so Arthur gave him one.
"To be a forger, I think you have to possess a fantastic sense of self. You have to really know who you are and be comfortable in your own skin to retain your identity in the face of so many transformations."
Eames was staring at him as though he'd never seen him before.
"Is that really how you see me?"
A little self-conscious, Arthur nevertheless nodded. He'd made pretty clear how he felt about the man in every other respect.
"Arthur." For once, Eames actually seemed to be at a loss for words. "Thank you."
Arthur'd had no notion of affecting the man that much; Eames always acted like he was the best, and he knew it.
Then Arthur remembered a few of the things that Eames had revealed when they were down in his subconscious. Perhaps that assurance wasn't quite as deep-rooted as it always appeared.
Arthur reached out and slipped his hand into Eames's, and they sat there for a few minutes in silence, watching the city grow beneath them, spires beginning to reach high enough now that soon they would approach the cloud level where they were perched.
"You underestimate yourself, you know."
Arthur looked over in confusion; Eames had said the words as though they were continuing a conversation.
"You came to get me in limbo," Eames continued. "You remembered who you were, and you never once gave in to temptation."
Arthur frowned. "You had to drag me out."
"Because you sacrificed your freedom for me." Eames looked exasperated. "Arthur, you're not superhuman. You knew the dangers down there, and you came to get me anyway."
"Maybe I wanted to go back. Hope let me because of you."
Eames actually rolled his eyes. "Hope's part of you, remember? You went back because you cared about something more than a dream."
Arthur opened his mouth, but Eames overrode him with an even stronger look of exasperation. "If you'd cared more about the dream than me, we'd both still be down there. You came back with me."
Arthur swallowed heavily, remembering with difficulty that moment where he had realised that Eames was going to die if he didn't return to reality, where everything had come back into focus long enough for him to decide what needed to be done, to make the choice that he had not made the first time.
He rallied with an effort, attempted to lighten the mood. "You're hotter than Hope is."
This surprised a laugh out of Eames, and Arthur found himself smiling, too. Eames squeezed his hand.
"Ready to wake up together?"
Arthur smiled.
"Yes."
Together, they leaned forward and tumbled into the air.
~*~
On to Coda
Back to Interlude
Disclaimer and author's note, etc., back in the Master Post
On the Wings of an Angel
text by phoenix.writing
illustrations by creepylicious
Part Three
Though Arthur knew better than to think he knew exactly what to expect in dreams, his dreams were becoming more and more bizarre-and he wasn't even working.
But he had known that no matter how angry Eames was, he would have questions eventually, and it didn't really come as a surprise that he had requested that they have the discussion in the dream world. It was absolutely expected that he wanted Arthur to be both the dreamer and the subject; he felt that they'd spent enough time in Eames's subconscious, and Arthur wasn't going to argue with him.
He knew, after all, that this was desperately difficult.
He had fought his first insane impulse to bring them to the bookstore. It was too early to be messing with Eames's sense of reality like that, and his reasoning might be misconstrued. Honestly, though, Arthur had just been trying to think of the most positive space for them, and the shop featured prominently as the location where they had been happiest. By far, really.
Since that thought was nixed, he had brought them to somewhere new that had no associations for either of them.
He'd started with a park on a mild spring day. He had no idea what Eames wanted to do and didn't want the man to feel as though he were boxed in. Arthur didn't think that alcohol would help this conversation, and he'd emptied the park so that if Eames felt the need to physically attack, there wouldn't be any witnesses.
He was going to take it as a good sign that it didn't seem as though Eames intended to maim him in reality.
They were sitting on a park bench with a good foot between them, which Arthur had thought safest under the circumstances. Eames was wearing one of his most garish shirts, an overly busy paisley pattern in horribly clashing colours of maroon and lime green and fluorescent orange.
The grass was very green, there were big fluffy white clouds in a very blue sky, and squirrels chased one another up and down the trees in front of them. A couple dogs barked in the distance, giving the illusion that the park was populated without any people getting in the way.
Arthur had a coffee in his hand, and it told him that he wasn't quite as in control as he'd meant to be because the thought had only been half-formed. But he knew without looking that it had caramel and cinnamon and too much frothed milk, and he handed it to Eames, who hesitated a shade too long before he took it, telling Arthur that he was probably lucky he hadn't had it thrown in his face.
At least he didn't have to worry about dry cleaning bills in dreams.
Eames took a sip of his coffee and stared out at the landscape rather than looking at Arthur, so Arthur looked straight ahead as well.
"This is all looking very normal," Eames observed.
Arthur had promised himself that he would answer any questions, but the temptation to answer monosyllabically here was almost impossible to ignore.
But Eames shouldn't have to work for it, not after everything he'd been through. He might hate Arthur now, but he still deserved answers.
"It usually does when I'm in control of myself."
"I've never seen anyone create like that, and that includes Cobb and Ariadne."
"It's not a very practical skill."
"Sort of extraordinary, though."
Arthur cast a sidelong look at Eames but couldn't read anything from his face. That had sounded kind of … complimentary. There were other words for what Arthur had done, words that had straightforward negative connotations.
There were so many places Arthur could go with that comment, and he finally went with what he thought might turn the conversation off him a little, or at least back to the direct subject at hand.
"The circumstances warranted it."
"You felt guilty for my being lost in limbo."
Arthur swallowed and admitted, "Yes."
Eames slammed the coffee cup down on the bench, and Arthur turned to find that the other man was glaring at him.
"You thought I sold you out!"
There really weren't words for how stupid Arthur felt about that. It was obvious that he had done, and it was still almost impossible for Arthur to nod his head and admit his stupidity.
But Eames had been lost in limbo and had killed a man because of Arthur's mistake.
"It was stupid and inexcusable. I apologize."
Eames let out a huff of breath. "Fuck, it's harder to be angry with you when you're being all downtrodden and honest. Start being snotty and entitled again so I can be annoyed."
Arthur felt his lips tip up a little in spite of himself and saw an answering gleam in Eames's eyes.
Arthur made himself keep talking, knowing he was not off the hook just because Eames had allowed a moment of humour. He'd camped out in Eames's subconscious, and he needed to be brutally honest in return.
"Learning what I thought was a complete betrayal of the trust that I reposed in you was kind of … earth-shattering. I panicked and needed to reassess everything; disappearing was the only way I knew to fix the problem that didn't involve … anything permanent."
Eames's head tilted slightly to one side, and his gaze was sharp.
"Tell me, Arthur, how close did Collins and I come to getting a bullet between the eyes?"
Arthur sucked in a breath and let it out slowly before offering a slightly shaky nod. Fortunately, Eames didn't press the point.
"But instead, you disappeared off the face of the planet."
"That doesn't impact anyone but me."
"And everyone who's looking for you, Darling."
Arthur would never admit the warmth that blossomed inside of him at hearing that ridiculous term of endearment again.
"I hadn't anticipated most people trying for very long."
"And didn't mind if some people wasted a lot of time and energy and money?" Eames asked pointedly.
"Not at the time," Arthur agreed.
"You are aware that most people can't poof into thin air at a whim?"
"I'm not most people."
"You don't talk about your training."
"It's hardly the sort of thing I want advertised, and I would think plenty of it could be inferred based on my abilities at work."
"There are abilities and then there are super powers."
Arthur laughed. "You haven't worked out by now that I like to be good at what I do?"
Eames rolled his eyes. "It's one of the most obvious things about you."
"So when I believed that I'd misjudged everything I knew about you, I corrected rather severely."
"Facts were pretty thin to the ground for you to have so little faith in me."
"I forgot how good you are at forging."
"That's insulting, you know."
It was said very mildly, though, and Arthur's lips tipped up.
"You sounded very convincing."
"'Eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves'," Eames quoted virtuously.
Arthur sighed. "Ariadne?"
Nodding, Eames admitted, "I'm still trying to work out how you heard everything, though. Collins designed it so that we wouldn't be overheard, and the only person-"
He cut off abruptly, straightening as though he'd been electrified, and Arthur just sat there and waited for the shit storm to start.
Eames erupted off the bench, stalked away six steps, and then whirled back to get in Arthur's face and demand, "What was I, then? Cheap labour when you didn't feel like it? Someone to laugh at afterwards?"
Arthur frowned. "You know you're the best, and I'm not a forger."
His definite words appeared to mollify the man a little, for he backed up a bit and sounded less enraged when he spoke again.
"You certainly didn't look like you down there. Not unless there's a sex change you've forgotten to tell me about."
Arthur's lip curled up. "That would be a less complicated answer."
An eyebrow rose. "I'm all ears."
Arthur drew a deep breath and let it out slowly.
"Hers is the only other form I can take, and no one else knows. Not Dom, not even Mal. I never use her for work, never when I'm sharing a dream."
"And yet…." Eames trailed off leadingly.
With an effort, Arthur stilled the urge to squirm and swallowed against a constricted throat. "I thought you were being tortured or killed."
Eames sat down on the bench again, only a great deal nearer than he had been before.
"You're very hard to work out, Darling. You blow hot and cold more effectively than central air."
Arthur snorted, and Eames's lips tipped up.
"Not really," Arthur corrected. "You told Collins exactly right. There isn't very much I won't do for the people I care about."
"You're telling me we're friends."
Arthur nearly laughed at the distaste that Eames had infused into the one word.
"I spent all my time in limbo flirting with you. I think it's been blown out of the water, Eames."
"You didn't even want to kiss me in a dream!" Eames snapped.
"Didn't want to kiss you?" Arthur made a choked sound in the back of his throat. "I wanted to kiss you so badly I could barely see straight. It took me weeks to be sure that when I saw you again, I wasn't going to forget who I was and the fact that I needed to rescue you."
Eames's eyebrows had drawn together in a scowl. "If that's the case, then why didn't you bring it up in reality?"
"When?" Arthur demanded incredulously. "While you were in the hospital recovering from a life-altering event with serious physical consequences?"
Arthur found himself quite suddenly on the ground with Eames on top of him.
"You are so fucking noble, Darling."
Any response that Arthur might have had to this was swallowed by Eames's mouth over his.
It was everything that Arthur wanted it to be. He was in the right body, and while they hadn't clarified everything, they both knew that they wanted this. And Eames was a fantastic kisser, something which Arthur had already known but which he got to appreciate to the fullest now.
It had been a long time since Eames had been on top of him like this; pressed up against the man in bed when he was recovering had sometimes been a bit torturous from Arthur's point of view, but it had almost always been completely non-sexual because it was so clear that Eames needed help.
Eames was much more recovered than he had been, and here in the dream, he remembered himself as he usually was, meaning everything worked just the way that it was supposed to.
When they needed to breathe again, Eames drew back to say, "You could have saved yourself doing a runner if you'd mentioned you'd like to talk about it when I was feeling well."
"You might have saved me two runners if you'd mentioned what you were doing after I refrained from shooting Collins."
"What do you think I was doing?" Eames demanded, sounding affronted.
"Trying to get into my pants?" Arthur thought that had been very obvious.
Eames rolled his eyes. "You always leave after a job, and you have never accepted my invitation for company. You didn't strike me as a bloke who shags and runs, and that would have given us the opportunity to figure out a game plan."
"Huh." This possibility had definitely not occurred to Arthur. "That was a good plan."
Eames leaned down to kiss Arthur again, though this kiss was much more fleeting before he rose to his feet and offered Arthur a hand, pulling him to his feet.
Wryly, Arthur observed, "It's a bad sign when you want answers more than you want sex, isn't it?"
Eames laughed and pulled Arthur back onto the bench. Their thighs were pressed together now, and Eames hadn't let go of Arthur's hand.
"I want a relationship more than I want sex," Eames corrected.
There was really no possible way that Arthur could respond to this other than to climb on top of Eames and try to examine his tonsils. Eames's hands slipped altogether lower than was polite, and Arthur tried simultaneously to deepen that contact and grind down against the other man.
"Was I saying something?" Eames asked when they came up for air.
"You very sensibly wanted to get some of our issues sorted," Arthur admitted, moving to sit back down.
Eames tightened his grip to hold Arthur in place. "Sod sensible."
"Sex can be the next order on the agenda."
Eames laughed and let Arthur climb off of him.
"I never thought I'd hear you say that."
"Dream a little bigger, Darling," Arthur repeated smugly.
This surprised a laugh out of Eames, though he sounded almost rueful when he admitted, "There were times where I thought I was dreaming pretty big as it was."
"I don't like to be a notch in a bedpost."
"It came across a little more as dismissive and occasionally homicidal, in case you were wondering."
"If I hadn't cared," Arthur corrected, "we would have gone to bed the first time you called me 'Darling'."
Eames positively crowed with delight. "I knew you liked it when I called you 'Darling'!"
Arthur's lips twitched, amused by just how pleased Eames was. "I'll deny it if asked."
"Of course you will, Darling." Eames tacked the endearment on with obvious relish.
Arthur resigned himself to never again hearing his actual name out of the other man's mouth. It was remarkably easy to accept when he was certain of the genuineness of the term.
Eames sighed and admitted, "I knew you well enough that I should have expected you to be suspicious about all of it, really. But I thought I'd have a little more time."
"I should have thought about it rationally. You should never have been put in that position," Arthur apologized.
Eames shook his head. "Oh, don't blame yourself for that one. It was never going to end any way other than a bullet to the head once he was stupid enough to tell me that he intended to kill you. He was a crap judge of character for an extractor."
Arthur didn't think Eames could be quite as blasé about it as he was claiming given that he had built himself a prison sentence in limbo, but they all had the feelings they didn't want to share.
"I still…. You didn't have to, and it means a lot to me that you went after him."
"Just because Cobb persists in having his head stuck up his arse doesn't mean that the rest of us don't care for you, Arthur."
Arthur stiffened and warned, "Don't go there, Eames."
Surprisingly, Eames looked a little … sheepish? "Kind of already did. Cobb wants to talk to you."
Arthur let out a big huffy sigh and tried to pretend that he wasn't kind of touched. Eames did this ridiculous thing where he looked at Arthur with puppy-dog eyes and then beamed when he realised that Arthur wasn't actually that upset.
Arthur rolled his eyes but couldn't help but smile back. God, he was going to have to find a backbone somewhere, or Eames was going to get everything he wanted all the damn time.
"Dom's going to have to get into line."
Eames's eyes flashed.
"I suppose you'd object if I ripped all your clothes off while we had our discussion?"
"I don't think there'd be a lot of discussion if you did that," Arthur pointed out wryly.
Eames's gaze, which had been focussed on Arthur's lips, was travelling steadily downward, and his hands inched their way up Arthur's thighs. "Discussion is overrated."
"But there are still a lot of things that you want to know."
Eames sighed and drew his eyes back up to Arthur's face with what looked like a monumental effort. His hands stopped moving, but they weren't removed.
"Those two notions should not be mutually exclusive, Darling."
"So, you're saying that you're going to be so mediocre I can carry on a coherent conversation at the same time?" Arthur asked dryly.
Eames's jaw came close to falling open. An incredulous smile lit up his face. "You are in for the ride of your life."
"I'm looking forward to it," Arthur admitted with a grin of his own. "But I'd go into it with a clearer conscience if I knew I'd answered all questions to your satisfaction."
And once he was sure that Eames still … cared. Arthur hadn't had any intention of saying it out loud, but he was pretty sure that his face had given too much away, because Eames suddenly looked a lot more serious.
"You were telling me about the pretty blonde."
Arthur rolled his eyes at the obvious line of inquiry, but conceded, "She probably will explain everything, in the end." He hesitated for a moment, and then told a story that he had never relayed in its entirety to anyone. "When I was eight, my parents and I were in a car crash. They died on impact, and I ended up in a coma."
Eames's fingers had tightened, digging into Arthur's thighs. Clearly, this wasn't at all what he had been expecting.
"I had some pretty severe head trauma, and I think I subconsciously knew that my parents were dead and that was my mind's way of trying to protect me." He swallowed, finding this harder than he'd thought he would. "I got totally lost down there. You saw the sort of stuff that I did. I could have stayed there forever."
"But here you are," Eames prompted gently when Arthur froze, sliding his hands down Arthur's thighs in a move that was curiously un-sexual.
"Here I am," Arthur agreed, grateful for the nudge, "and that's thanks to Hope."
"How did hope help if you were happy down there?"
"The 'pretty blonde' is named Hope."
"Ah." Eames looked a little chagrined again, and Arthur wondered if it was a mark of Arthur's honesty now or the fact that they'd spent so much time in limbo together that Eames seemed to be so much more willing to show Arthur genuine emotion now. "I'll stick to mentioning her eyes from now on, shall I? Her nice personality?"
Arthur laughed. "You haven't been on her bad side. I hated her for quite a while."
"I take it she's the one who got you out of limbo?"
"Not the way you mean, but yes."
Eames looked puzzled now. "How many ways are there? My brain's going to explode if you tell me I'm a mental construct who's been in limbo with you since you were eight."
Arthur rolled his eyes, impressed with the way that Eames could make him feel better with irreverence without making Arthur feel as though the other man wasn't taking it seriously.
"She forced me out of limbo."
Eames frowned. "No one can force you out of limbo. You have to-Ah."
You have to do it yourself. It was why Dom couldn't have just killed Mal in her sleep and woken them up in reality. Why he'd needed to make Saito aware of the truth. Why Ariadne and Fischer had jumped together.
And why Hope wasn't a real person, or Arthur would have died or gone insane.
"She's, uh, sort of like Dom's projection of Mal, I guess. Has her own personality and agenda."
"But she was trying to save you," Eames pointed out gently.
Arthur nodded stiffly. "I really didn't want to leave. And when I woke up in a world where I was weak and alone and a child, all I wanted to do was get back. I had foster parents for a bit, but I wasn't really … coping well. Ended up in a home and spent all my time and energy trying to figure out how to get back there-and get around Hope, because she had warned me that I wouldn't be able to find it and get past her easily. I think it was her way of making sure I didn't just walk in front of a bus or take a header from a building or something."
If he'd been sure he could have got back to his world, he would have done it. Eames's hands had tightened on Arthur's thighs again, so Arthur was pretty sure the sentiment had been communicated.
"I had to get creative. I spent the next ten years learning everything there was to know about comas and lucid dreaming and altered states of reality. Got my hands on a PASIV and started experimenting."
Eames was frowning. "It wasn't declassified before you turned eighteen."
"No," Arthur agreed.
"Shit, Darling," Eames swore, and there was a great deal of admiration in his voice. "You stole a PASIV from the military before you turned eighteen?"
"I was pretty desperate," Arthur conceded with a shrug. "I spent a long time with the machine on my own, but it was never right. I could make changes and creations, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't home. So then I thought using the PASIV with someone else in a coma would get me to the right level and bypass Hope. But it wasn't my world, and it wasn't very…. It was a lot less pleasant than mine, and it was like he was trapped, not happy there. I tried to get us both out."
Eames tugged Arthur closer and wrapped an arm around him, pressing a kiss to the side of his head. Arthur sighed and leaned into the embrace, telling himself that he wasn't snuggling and wondering who he was trying to fool. Eames felt fantastically warm, and Arthur was feeling very cold.
"He died." Arthur forced the words out through a constricted throat. "For the first time, I started to think that maybe locked in my own head wasn't where I should be."
Eames had started running his fingers through Arthur's hair, destroying the work that the gel had been doing. It was rhythmic and soothing-and seemed to underline very solidly that Eames wasn't running away from him in disgust. Arthur kept talking.
"At that point, I came under some … professional scrutiny, and once it became clear that I was far more knowledgeable than any of their so-called experts, I got pulled in to be part of their nascent dream work department."
The hands in Arthur's hair stilled suddenly; uncomfortable, Arthur pulled back.
Eames was staring at him like he'd never seen him before. "You're a spook?"
"I was, yes," Arthur admitted stiffly, a sick feeling churning in the pit of his stomach.
"And you actually wander around in a suit all the time?"
Arthur was spared the necessity of speaking by Eames dissolving into laughter, clutching at Arthur as he was altogether overcome by his mirth.
A tight constriction eased inside of Arthur as he realised that Eames simply had a questionable sense of humour rather than repudiating Arthur because he'd worked for a questionable governmental authority.
Eames wiped tears out of his eyes and got himself under control with an effort, still chuckling periodically and muttering under his breath about spooks.
Arthur weathered the storm, still massively relieved but feeling that he needed to hold onto his persona-and maybe a little annoyed that Eames found it that funny. He liked his suits and felt very professional in them, thank you very much. (Still, it was hard to be too annoyed when the other man looked so relaxed and happy and amused.)
"Just so you know," Arthur informed Eames matter-of-factly, "you're never wearing a horrible shirt again."
"Going to keep tearing me out of them, Darling?" Eames asked with a leer.
"Oh, it's not going to be nearly that fun for you," Arthur said smugly.
Eames raised an eyebrow.
"Looked at what you're wearing recently?"
Eames looked down at himself and then his head snapped up with comic speed.
"You can't alter me!" he yelped.
"Oh?" Arthur asked with mock innocence.
He let the suit fade away into the clothes the other man had come with-except that the hideous print had been replaced with a nice solid blue (that happened to match Eames's eyes, but Arthur wasn't going to mention that).
Eames still seemed shocked, and Arthur took pity on him.
"You can change it back if you concentrate hard enough."
Eames stared down at the shirt until it became flamboyantly colourful once more.
He looked up at Arthur again.
"I didn't think that could be done."
"We're all just projections of ourselves down here."
"Well, sure, but I'm supposed to control my projection of me."
"And you do. Something integral like your face, I can't change-unlike you-but your clothes are ephemeral. I control what I see, and I spent an eternity creating a world I wanted to live in, altering anything and everything with a thought."
"How many abilities do you hide on a regular basis?"
Arthur shrugged. "I don't really keep track. I know what people can generally do in dreams, and I know what abilities it's safer if others never start experimenting with. I do my best to protect people that way."
"You tried to keep Mal and Cobb out of limbo," Eames observed shrewdly.
Arthur looked away. "They loved experimenting together, and they were getting there so differently from me, and it was the two of them, and I … hoped that they would be okay. I tried to warn them of the dangers of what lay deeper, but I didn't tell them why specifically, and if I had-"
Eames cupped Arthur's face with his hands, making Arthur look at him. "She would still be dead, Arthur. You know both of them, probably better than anyone. They were stubborn, and there was nothing they didn't think they could accomplish. They would have told you that the situation was different, that you were alone and a child. They would have wanted to pit their intelligence against that problem. You could never have stopped them-and they wouldn't have taken you with them."
Arthur's eyes flickered closed, escaping from Eames's bright eyes that saw too much. Arthur wanted to believe him, but he wasn't sure that he could.
Eames leaned forward so that his forehead was resting against Arthur's, too close to stare at one another now, giving Arthur the distance he wanted-as well as the continued closeness.
"I don't think you hold any responsibility there, but even if you bear the smallest portion, you have more than made up for it. You moved mountains for him and the kids, kept them together when there was no logical reason for everything not to fall apart."
Arthur drew in a shuddering breath and let it out slowly. "It was so awful," he admitted, yet one more thing that he had never confessed to anyone else. "I remember being like her, so desperate to get somewhere else. She wanted to go back to what she thought was reality; I wanted to go back to the dream…. She lied, like I did, pretended to be placated for a little while, but never changed her mind."
"She didn't have Hope."
"I tried. I tried to convince her. I talked her out of slitting her wrists and carbon monoxide in the car. I don't think Dom ever found out about the pills and getting her stomach pumped. Pulled her back from oncoming traffic, caught her when she claimed she tripped at the top of the stairs, and tried to get her to see someone."
"Jesus Christ," Eames breathed against Arthur's face.
Arthur kept his eyes closed and concentrated on the feeling of the two of them touching.
"I tried to get her to believe in Cobb and the kids and me, just like Cobb did, but there was still that look in her eyes sometimes, and then Cobb called and-"
He broke off, unable to continue, and Eames pulled away to snarl, "I should have broken his face."
"It wasn't his fault," Arthur protested.
"I'm not even going to try to go there, Darling; I'm talking about what happened afterward. You shouldn't have had to keep this all inside for him."
"Not for him," Arthur murmured almost voicelessly.
"Ah."
Arthur snorted and pulled away far enough to look at Eames clearly.
"I'm not in love with her."
Eames didn't say anything, which Arthur could tell was his attempt to be diplomatic. He leaned forward and pressed his lips to Eames's in a firm but chaste kiss.
"Not really interested in women like that. I loved her, but she was the first true friend I'd had since I was eight."
"That's-"
"Sad, I know."
"I was going to say lonely. I'm glad she was there for you."
"She came up on the radar, and I was sent to assess what sort of a threat she was. I knew immediately that she outstripped the abilities of the vast majority of our agents. But she was … nice, and the Agency and I had begun to have ideological differences with regards to the dream work. So I took a chance and offered to throw in my lot with hers. She thought I was wasted as a phantôme and accepted."
"I wouldn't think that the Agency would just let you go like that."
Arthur eyed him, and Eames scoffed. "You didn't."
"She helped me perform the extraction, enough to be sure that they'd never come after me and giving me the time to perform a full wipe of the soft and hard copy."
"Shit, Darling. It's like finding out you're Spider-Man."
Arthur raised an eyebrow, not altogether getting the comparison.
"Well, see, you're all cool and efficient but normal. A little bit repressed and sort of mysterious, but that's just part of the fun. Only then I find out that you're a dream super ninja performing extractions on the CI-fucking-A."
Arthur waited for the punch line.
"It's incredibly hot."
He laughed, pleased that Eames was taking this so well.
Eames tugged him in for another kiss before asking, "Any other super powers I should know about? Shoot web out of your wrists?"
"Technically, the webbing isn't a superpower. Contrary to how it's often portrayed in films, it's just tech that's attached to Peter's wrists. He runs out all the time in the comic books."
Eames stared at him steadily, and Arthur felt a blush heat up his face. Eames's lips tipped up and then he tugged Arthur in for another kiss.
"That's quite possibly one of the cutest things I've ever witnessed, my little comic book geek."
"Do you have a death wish?" Arthur asked calmly.
"If I get to hear you go all geeky again? Quite possibly."
Arthur glared.
"Okay, okay." Eames raised his hands in an "I surrender" gesture but let the matter go with the air of a man who was going to bring it up again at the next available opportunity. "X-ray vision? Leap over tall buildings in a single bound?"
Arthur sighed and rose to his feet. He really wasn't going to get a better chance than this.
"I stopped trying to get back into limbo. I didn't see Hope again but occasionally I'd see … traces of her. And once we'd reconciled, I discovered that when I was in regular dream levels, I could appear as her."
"Which you only do when I'm in trouble," Eames pointed out promptly.
"You are so close to getting punched in the face," Arthur warned.
Eames just sat on the bench looking all smug and right. So Arthur shifted. Eames's lips tipped up into a lazy smile.
"Just as lovely as I remember-and it really is such a relief to know that I wasn't attracted to anything in that man's mind."
Arthur rolled his eyes. "Do you think we could stick to the point?"
"You mean you weren't trying to show me what a sexy woman you make?"
"I was showing you that I'm not a woman at all."
Eames's eyes made a very obvious perusal of Arthur's currently very female-looking form. Arthur waited until the other man's eyes made it back up to his face, the look of challenge in them clear, and then he launched himself into the sky, wings unfurling and carrying him aloft before he twisted and swooped back down to land lightly in front of Eames.
The man's jaw had actually dropped.
"You're an angel." He sounded completely dumbfounded.
"Hope is my guardian angel," Arthur corrected as he changed back into his regular form.
"An angel."
Arthur was sort of regretting showing off now. But he hadn't wanted to hide anything from Eames; if he was going to decide that this was all too much for him, Arthur would really prefer that it happen sooner than later.
He nodded in response to the comment and just stood there, awaiting a verdict.
"Can you carry me?"
Arthur blinked at him. Eames shot him a scathing glance.
"Can the two of us fly?"
Oh. Arthur had had altogether improbable images of him scooping the man up in his arms like he was going to … oh, carry him over the threshold or something, and he'd gotten altogether distracted.
"I have no idea," he admitted, reminding Eames, "It's never been anyone but me."
There'd been projections, sometimes, and Arthur had launched himself to the warehouse window with that one subcon, but sustained flight?
It had never crossed his mind.
"Curious?" Eames asked brightly.
Now that the idea had been brought up?
Eames grinned at him, rising to his feet, and Arthur became Hope once more.
"You realise this could end in tears?" he felt compelled to point out.
"It's a dream, Darling. Live a little."
"I'm going to regret saying this, I'm sure, but wrap your arms around my waist. Don't want you to get in the way of the wings."
Eames wrapped.
"My waist."
Eames corrected his grip reluctantly. Arthur tugged them together, wrapping his own arms around Eames's back. Hope's breasts were now squashed between them, and Arthur was reminded of how weird this was. They hadn't been quite this intimately twined when they were dancing in Collins's dream.
"Crouch a little." Arthur did so to illustrate, and Eames mirrored his movement. "I'm going to count to three, and then we're both going to kick off from the ground as hard as we can. Ready?"
"I was born ready."
Arthur duly counted down and kicked off with Eames. As Hope's wings unfurled, he knew that the weight was all wrong, but he flapped anyway, big sweeping strokes of his wings as hard as he could, reminded of those early occasions when he had first shifted and had needed to practice to even get off the ground and not wobble and drop at the slightest change in circumstance. Eames was clutching at him, holding too tight, but this made Arthur realise that he had a death grip on Eames, too.
Arthur soared higher and higher so that he would have room to coast and could possibly relax a bit and not just squeeze Eames to death.
The sun felt warmer up here, the breeze different, somehow, when you were flying through it and not attached to the ground. He wasn't nearly high enough to worry about thinning oxygen, and since Hope wasn't human, Arthur found that when he wasn't overreacting, it was possible to hold Eames up fairly easily. They still needed to keep a pretty tight hold on one another, but it started to feel a little more natural.
Eames was looking around himself curiously, peering at the large park and the city that was laid out below them in a very organised grid.
Eames leaned closer to speak in Arthur's ear.
"You are such a perfectionist, Darling."
"You say that like it's a bad thing," Arthur said with mock affront.
Laughing, Eames pointed out, "But you could do anything here. Why do this?"
"Because it gives nothing away. Because it means that I can navigate the city with ease."
"Who are you running from here?" Eames asked, as though Arthur had missed the obvious.
"It's always good to practice."
"I dare you to do something wild and crazy."
Arthur twisted and dove straight down, and Eames let out the most adorable yelp as he clutched desperately at Arthur. Arthur laughed in sheer delight at the rushing wind and the energy of it all.
Hope levelled out altogether closer to the ground than Eames was comfortable with if the fingers digging into Arthur's skin were any indication, and then Arthur was soaring upwards once more with great sweeping motions of Hope's wings, carrying the two of them aloft and reflecting that that had been kind of fun.
"Give a bloke a little warning next time, would you, Love?" Eames requested, sounding a little queasy.
Arthur just grinned at him, and a reluctant smile was tugged out of Eames as well.
"All right, I asked for that," he admitted.
Arthur smiled even more brightly, and a light that Arthur recognized blossomed in Eames's eyes.
"If you don't want to get shagged in that form, you'd better get us to solid ground right now."
Eames started when his feet touched something solid, and he looked round himself in wonder.
"I always wanted to do this," he said with awe.
"I was eight," Arthur reminded him softly.
Eames whirled around again, because Arthur was himself once more, and he'd dressed in jeans and a t-shirt in honour of the occasion, bare feet pressed into the improbably solid cloud beneath him.
"C'mere," Arthur instructed, and went to sit on the edge of the cloud, legs dangling over the edge-because that was what he wanted to do, and that was reason enough to do it.
A little more cautious, Eames followed, eventually seated next to him, whatever he had been thinking apparently forgotten as he watched the world beneath them destroyed in a fiery spray of lava from the active volcanoes that now covered the surface.
No smoke or ash ever reached them on their fluffy white cloud. Once the world had cooled again, a new city began to grow there.
"That's really quite extraordinary, you know," Eames said conversationally, but there was something underlying his tone that told Arthur that he really meant it.
Arthur shrugged. "I was there for a long time with a child's imagination. There were no limits, nothing I couldn't do."
"If that's the case, why can't you forge?"
"It never occurred to me as a child. I didn't want to be someone else, not like that. I enjoyed changing the world around me, but I didn't look in mirrors. I'm not sure I looked at myself the whole time I was there."
"Now, then," Eames pressed.
Arthur wondered why this bothered the other man so much. "Apart from needing the raw ability and possessing the requisite amount of sheer animal magnetism?"
Eames's lips tipped up, but he didn't say anything, telling Arthur that he really wanted an answer-an honest answer, so Arthur gave him one.
"To be a forger, I think you have to possess a fantastic sense of self. You have to really know who you are and be comfortable in your own skin to retain your identity in the face of so many transformations."
Eames was staring at him as though he'd never seen him before.
"Is that really how you see me?"
A little self-conscious, Arthur nevertheless nodded. He'd made pretty clear how he felt about the man in every other respect.
"Arthur." For once, Eames actually seemed to be at a loss for words. "Thank you."
Arthur'd had no notion of affecting the man that much; Eames always acted like he was the best, and he knew it.
Then Arthur remembered a few of the things that Eames had revealed when they were down in his subconscious. Perhaps that assurance wasn't quite as deep-rooted as it always appeared.
Arthur reached out and slipped his hand into Eames's, and they sat there for a few minutes in silence, watching the city grow beneath them, spires beginning to reach high enough now that soon they would approach the cloud level where they were perched.
"You underestimate yourself, you know."
Arthur looked over in confusion; Eames had said the words as though they were continuing a conversation.
"You came to get me in limbo," Eames continued. "You remembered who you were, and you never once gave in to temptation."
Arthur frowned. "You had to drag me out."
"Because you sacrificed your freedom for me." Eames looked exasperated. "Arthur, you're not superhuman. You knew the dangers down there, and you came to get me anyway."
"Maybe I wanted to go back. Hope let me because of you."
Eames actually rolled his eyes. "Hope's part of you, remember? You went back because you cared about something more than a dream."
Arthur opened his mouth, but Eames overrode him with an even stronger look of exasperation. "If you'd cared more about the dream than me, we'd both still be down there. You came back with me."
Arthur swallowed heavily, remembering with difficulty that moment where he had realised that Eames was going to die if he didn't return to reality, where everything had come back into focus long enough for him to decide what needed to be done, to make the choice that he had not made the first time.
He rallied with an effort, attempted to lighten the mood. "You're hotter than Hope is."
This surprised a laugh out of Eames, and Arthur found himself smiling, too. Eames squeezed his hand.
"Ready to wake up together?"
Arthur smiled.
"Yes."
Together, they leaned forward and tumbled into the air.
~*~
On to Coda